


Family Reunion

by ErinPtah



Series: Fur, Scales, Wings, & Tails [6]
Category: Fake News FPF, Magic School Bus, Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Bad Puns, Canon Gay Relationship, Canon-Typical Character Death, Carlos (Night Vale) is Carlos Ramon, Cecil Has Tentacles, Cecil is Mostly Human, Cousins, Crack, Crossover, Extended Families, For Science!, M/M, Multiple Crossovers, One Big Happy Weird Family, Repressed Memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-24
Updated: 2013-10-10
Packaged: 2017-12-27 12:33:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/978926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ErinPtah/pseuds/ErinPtah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cecil brings Carlos as his date to a family reunion. He can't wait to catch up with his journalist cousin Stephen, and he's sure Carlos will get along great with his scientist aunt Valerie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [On The Ice](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12576724) by [Caranthira](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caranthira/pseuds/Caranthira). 



> Aww yeah, multi-crossover time.
> 
> Tagged with the Major Character Death warning just to be safe, but it's no worse than you'd expect if you follow Night Vale. Links/citations for specific canon callbacks will be at the end of each chapter.

"Here, let me fix that," said Jon, trying to figure out which buttons on the rental car controlled the radio. It had started picking a weird kind of static, or at least Jon assumed it was static, because what radio station would deliberately play something that sounded like incoherent growling?

"Don't touch that dial, Stewart!" snapped Stephen. "It's a very respectable local program. And it means we're getting close!"

"Uh, sure," said Jon, and settled back into the passenger seat.

He still wasn't sure what they were close _to_. Some subset of Stephen's extended family had booked a couple of lodges at a nice resort to get together and have a reunion, but Stephen had refused to give Jon the name of the resort, or the exact location, or even what kind of a setting it was. When Jon insisted that he at least had to know whether to pack for a desert or a beach or a forest, Stephen had waved his hands and said, "Oh, just pack for everything."

So for all Jon knew, the All-Growling Hour was a cherished local tradition in whatever part of South Carolina they were in. (It had to be South Carolina. Their flights were booked from LaGuardia to Charleston International, and they hadn't been driving _that_ long.)

"Before we get there," continued Stephen, more calmly, "I want to remind you one more time that this side of my family can be...eccentric. So be on your best manners, and if you come across anything unusual, just don't..."

He'd given this speech at least four times since inviting Jon at all. "Stephen, relax," urged Jon. "If they're not going to bat an eye at our relationship, I'm sure I can manage to be polite to them."

Not that anyone in this day and age should be batting an eye at same-sex relationships. (Half of Stephen's family still did. That was the half he no longer spoke to.) But there were other parts of their situation that reasonable people might be put off by, and if this mysterious set of relatives was really so far down the other end of the tolerance scale, Jon was going to be thrilled.

"Jon, you didn't let me finish." Stephen's hands tensed on the wheel as they sped down the tree-lined highway. "You have to not...freak out. Or scream. Or hide. Or run to the nearest phone and call up the SCP Foundation. In fact, you really shouldn't let on that you've ever heard of the SCP Foundation."

Oh.

"Stephen," said Jon carefully, "do you remember that time you called me up for advice on what to put down on the insurance form, after you had to clear out your studio when it was taken over by mutant wheat?"

"I have learned a lot about insurance codes since then," said Stephen, sulking a little. "Specifically, I have learned that you can hire people to figure them out so you don't have to care about them."

"And do you have any idea how many times I've eaten at one of the Starbucks restaurants under your desk? You know, in the space where, according to all the laws of physics, there shouldn't be room for more than a couple of espresso machines?"

"Well, it's not like I _count_ them. Although I know it's been enough to get your ticket punched ten times, because you got that eleventh latte free."

"Uh-huh. And how about that time the whole place was infected by radioactive spider DNA, and you grew two extra arms?"

That brought Stephen's mood back up. "Oh, I remember that well," he said, the smile spreading across his face. "Why, do you want to do it again? Because I'm not keeping them permanently, it's not worth the cost of re-tailoring all my suits, but for a special occasion...."

"Um," said Jon. Those were some very distracting mental images, and he could not afford to get distracted. He was on an important train of thought, here. "My point is. And we are coming back to that question later. But my point is, Stephen, if this is the side of your family that's...weird? I do have a fair amount of experience in weird. My freaking-out threshold: not all that low. I promise."

"Well, good!" cried Stephen. "That's great, that's just wonderful to hear. Grab some peanuts or something out of my backpack, will you? We're about to cross the border."

"What border?" asked Jon, though he obediently unzipped the backpack that had been sitting next to his feet and started fishing around for the tin of peanuts. "And how can you even tell? There aren't any signs anywhere ahead of us...."

That was the point when his ears stuffed up, like they'd just been through a sharp change in air pressure.

Jon found the peanuts and nabbed a handful for himself. The chewing and swallowing motion popped the pressure back to equal in his ears as he sat up and glanced out the window...

...where there was now a snow-capped mountain peak, visible beyond the treeline outside Jon's window.

"The hell?" said Jon.

But Stephen was breathing a sigh of relief.

And when Jon turned to check on his boyfriend he found Stephen relaxed, grinning, and checking out the new scenery with a grand total of three, count 'em, three honey-brown eyes. "Weird at last, weird at last!" he exclaimed. "Thank God Almighty, weird at last!"

 

///

 

On the front porch of the main cabin, in the middle of what appeared to be an ordinary stretch of southeastern flatwoods if not for the mountain visible to the north and the occasional batch of palm trees, Carlos was indulging in something he hadn't gotten to do for a long time.

Using a pencil.

There wasn't anything special he needed to write, but he was a scientist; he knew how to get data out of anything. For the moment he had gathered a bunch of leaves off the nearest trees and bushes (after he got Cecil's assurance that they weren't poisonous, of course), and was filling notebook pages with sketches of their structures.

The family with all the kids had started up a casual game of baseball in the back yard, which Carlos had politely declined to join in, on account of the fact that both the bat and the ball were spiked. The woman with the horns had been arguing on her phone in Modified Sumerian ever since she got out of the car. And Cecil was fixing some tea for one of his older aunts when another rental car showed up.

So Carlos was alone out front to greet this next part of the family. Well, that was all right. A scientist is self-reliant. As long as a scientist is not expected to do something like face a fire-breathing second cousin unarmed.

The car crunched its way up the gravel in front of the cabin, and a three-eyed man in a polo shirt stuck his head out the driver's-side window. "This the Palmer reservation?" he shouted.

"That's right!" called Carlos. "Come on in! Leave your stuff for now. We're not hashing out who sleeps where until everybody gets here."

"Great!" yelled the driver, and crunched the car a few more feet.

Carlos had just enough time to think his voice sounded oddly familiar before he and another man climbed out of the vehicle, and oh, hey, Carlos know those faces from TV. In their two-eyed incarnations, anyway. "Aren't you from _The Daily Show_?" he blurted, standing to greet them.

" _Formerly_ from _The Daily Show_ ," said Stephen Colbert testily.

"Of course, of course. Sorry, I haven't caught your shows much since college, and that was a while ago," stammered Carlos. "We don't get a lot of mainstream TV in Night Vale."

"Well, sir, you have us at a disadvantage," said Jon Stewart, offering him a handshake. "Or at least, you have me at a disadvantage. I just found out about that extra eye like ten minutes ago, and I don't know what the hell it can see."

"Normal things," sulked Stephen. "And somewhat into the ultraviolet spectrum, and angels. And the occasional aura. No big deal."

Carlos filed that statement away as something to do science on later, and focused on Jon, accepting the handshake. "Does that mean you're another plus-one?" he asked hopefully. "My name's Carlos, and this is my first time being around more than one of the family, so —"

"Carlos?" interrupted Stephen, looking at him in sudden horror. " _Cecil's_ Carlos?"

"Well." Carlos blushed. "You could say that."

Stephen charged past the both of them and threw open the front door. "CECIL!"

Now, granted, it had been some time since Carlos had seen much of the man on TV, and people change, and sometimes you have to give people the benefit of the doubt.

But sometimes you also have to be realistic, and in this case Carlos was steeling himself for the realistic possibility that Stephen's anger was about to explode in something fantastically racist.

"Be right there!" came Cecil's voice from the depths of the cabin. (Well, "cabin" was sort of a misnomer. They were houses, and maintained by the resort in a fairly cushy state, but the log-cabin-y exteriors let PR get away with making them sound quaint and rustic.) "Just a second!"

Sure enough, exactly one second later (assuming time was more stable here than it was in Night Vale, anyway), Cecil himself strolled down the front hall, wiping his hands on a dishtowel. He was wearing a purple tunic with glittery sleeves over dark leggings, which put him around the middle on the scale of weird outfits Carlos had seen so far today, and lit up when he realized who had arrived. "Cousin Stephen! How have you —"

" _This_ is your Carlos?" cried Stephen, shouting right over him. "THIS is your _boyfriend_?"

But instead of getting defensive, Cecil relaxed into the most self-satisfied smirk Carlos had ever seen. "That's him."

In a voice that was equal parts fury and despair, Stephen croaked, "I hate you _so much_."

"Oh, don't be like that," purred Cecil, in 100% Radio Voice. "I'm sure _your_ boyfriend has a...."

He reached the front door. He looked Jon up and down. Jon gave him a self-conscious little wave.

"...very charming personality," finished Cecil.

"Hey!"

"Kill me now," muttered a mortified Carlos, burying his face in his hands.

After more than a year of Night Vale, he really should have learned to be more careful with figures of speech. "Gladly!" yelled Stephen, and for a few minutes it took both Cecil and Jon to hold him back.

 

\\\\\

 

When Jon heard the details of the baseball game, he wasn't too keen on going near the back yard for now either. And it seemed like Stephen should probably be chaperoned for a while at this point. So Cecil got them some tea, and all three ended up taking chairs in the nice big sitting room, alone except for the obligatory kid who had parked herself on the couch and was ignoring the rest of the world in favor of a dusty, leather-bound book.

It was a nice homey room, lots of finished wood, and floor-to-ceiling windows on one wall to let in the shadows of the trees and the sunlight off the mountain. "We're in the Atlantic coastal plain," said Jon, still not happy about that last detail. "Where did a mountain come from?"

"No idea," said Stephen. "It wasn't there last time I visited."

"It probably isn't real," put in Cecil. "Most mountains aren't, you know."

"Oh, well, that would explain it," said Jon, not knowing how else to respond. Obviously this subject was going nowhere. Time to find a different line of conversation. "So, ah...Palmer, that doesn't sound like a really Jewish last name. Is there a story behind that, or...?"

Cecil looked at him with interest over a mug of tea. "Do I look Jewish to you?"

"Oh, geez, sorry!" stammered Jon, trying not to cringe too hard. You take a few months away from your show and suddenly you lose all your interviewing skills, apparently. Just because the guy had the dark brown curls, and that nose, and the chin, and, well, the everything else..."Didn't mean to make assumptions."

"He's never met one of you before," explained Stephen, who was now flopped across the arms of his chair like an overlarge cat.

While Jon was still trying to work out what ethnic group would make this conversation make any sense, Cecil said, "Of course! It's all right, Jon, I look different to everyone. I mean, completely different. Age and sex seems to be constant, and people usually report seeing the same eyes, but that's all. How do my eyes look to you, by the way?"

"Um," said Jon. He felt like he was going to be saying that a lot this vacation. "They're, well, purple. Kind of a striking shade of it, honestly."

"That's them!"

"So I guess this means _Carlos_ sees you as another impossibly hot male model," grumbled Stephen, narrowing all three eyes at his cousin.

Cecil glared right back. "Carlos is a _scientist_."

"That explains the lab coat," muttered Jon.

"So he sees you as someone who happens to _look_ like a male model," said Stephen, undeterred. "No wonder you landed him!"

"As a scientist," countered Cecil, "it is Carlos' job to be interested in facts. Objective truth. Things that can be proven."

"I am slightly less jealous of you now," allowed Stephen.

"Hang on," cut in Jon, brain making several leaps of inference at once. "Are you trying to say that whatever version of you Carlos sees...is the actual you?"

Cecil's cheeks flushed a pleased shade of light purple. "Exactly."

"Wow," said Jon. "No wonder you like _him_."

 

///

 

Carlos got drawn back into the thick of things when some of the other adults started coordinating dinner. There were a few family members still due to arrive, but the kids were starting to get restless, and if left to fend for themselves there was no telling what they'd start eating.

One of Cecil's relatives (they all got addressed as Cousin or Aunt or Uncle; none of the exact relationships were totally clear) started interrogating Carlos about some of his experiments in Night Vale while Carlos was mixing salad ingredients. The man was also wearing a sort of lab coat, big lacy Victorian collar notwithstanding, and it almost felt like they were having a normal conversation about real-world science until he asked Carlos to taste-test the soup and tell him if it needed more cyanide.

"Da-ad!" groaned a teenage boy in a rainbow tiger-striped jumpsuit, who had come in to try to sneak off with one of the burgers early. "Uncle Cecil _told_ you his boyfriend was cyanide intolerant!"

"Oh, no." Carlos hunched protectively over the salad, suddenly afraid it might be the only dish that wouldn't kill him. "Has anybody been keeping track of what ingredients they're using?"

"Ah, don't worry, Curly, the turducken's safe," laughed the gravelly-voiced Cousin BJ, pulling the birds in question out of the oven. "And the imaginary corn won't kill ya."

Carlos noticed he didn't say anything about the cinnamon rolls. Great. And here he'd been looking forward to enjoying some wheat by-products, too.

The whole clan — it had to be more than thirty by now — wasn't going to fit in any of the cabins, so they pulled together picnic tables out back and unfolded all kinds of mismatched chairs to sit around them. As people started jockeying for seats, Carlos pulled Jon aside to warn him about the soup, and the nearly-everything-else.

"I know, right?" said Stephen in exasperation. "Aunt Morticia _always_ puts too much hemlock in her biscuits. I _hate_ hemlock."

"Uh, wow." Jon turned to Carlos. "I'm just gonna sit next to you and let you try everything first, if you don't mind."

"Taking risks for the sake of experimentation is part of being a scientist," Carlos assured him. When Jon didn't seem sure how to take that, he added, "Besides, I trust Cecil to warn me if anything too harmful comes along."

 

\\\\\

 

Jon had promised Stephen not to freak out, and so far he thought he was doing a pretty good job.

Especially considering that he was almost the only "outsider" present. Of the guests who weren't family of Stephen's by blood, the majority were still residents of Night Vale, or Twin Peaks, or Eureka, or Gravity Falls, or any number of other towns that ran on the same flexible laws of reality (not to mention fashion) as Stephen's studio. And of the other two exceptions, one of them — Cousin BJ's wife Lydia — had practically gone native, if her blood-red poncho with spiderwebs all over it was any indication.

That left Cousin Cecil's boyfriend Carlos. Granted, Carlos seemed to think lab coats were casual wear and had no trouble eating imaginary corn, but at least he totally understood when Jon couldn't figure out how to butter something that wasn't there.

They were comparing local subway systems (Jon's had been shut down for three hours because there were kittens on the tracks; Carlos' took you on an eons-long fugue in the four minutes between stops) when a car horn sounded off a cheerful _beep-beep!_ out front.

Carlos jumped.

A couple of the younger children shrieked in delight, and very few of them waited for parental permission to leave the tables. Plenty of adults looked pretty giddy themselves. "It's Aunt Valerie!" squeaked Stephen as he abandoned his plate of turducken and hemlock biscuits, joining Cecil and the fun-sized mob of kids as they trampled the grass on their way to the front yard.

Which left Jon at the end of a table with Carlos, who was shaking his head slowly, as if to clear it.

"You okay?"

"Fine, don't worry. Sound just really took me back, that's all." Carlos gave him a sheepish smile. "To third grade, believe it or not. The bus horn sounded exactly like that. And we were on it all the time, because our teacher was always taking us on these great field trips...museums, parks, zoos...."

"Listen, my mom was a teacher for years, so I'm always happy to hear them get appreciated," Jon assured him. And, okay, now Carlos was pulling off his glasses and massaging his temples. "Seriously, are you sure you didn't eat anything suspicious?"

"Just a headache," said Carlos, waving his worries back. "It's weird...I'm trying to remember specific places we went, but everything's coming up vague."

"Well, you did say it was the third grade," said Jon reasonably. "It's been a while."

"The thing is, her class was the whole reason I got inspired to become a scientist in the first place. So you'd think it would have made more of an impression, right?" Carlos pinched the bridge of his nose. "Gah, what was that one place...our parents came along, and we were doing this unit on nocturnal animals...."

The commotion of the departed kids was getting louder again; they must have picked up the latest arrival. Jon thought he caught the trill of an unfamiliar woman's voice above the chatter, too muffled to make out any words but too distinctive to miss.

Carlos sat up straighter, and put his glasses back on in a hurry.

One of the children yelled something, and this time the reply was clear: "Yes, I absolutely want to see the insect you found! Did you know that scientists have described over one million different species of insects? But they all agree there are at least a million more still undiscovered! Who knows, maybe you've found a new one!"

The excited crowd rounded the corner of the building and poured back into the yard.

At the center of the gaggle of the kids, with Cecil and Stephen and a handful of other adults in tow, was a woman: neither short nor tall, neither fat nor thin, neither old nor young. She had vibrant red-orange hair, most of which was piled up in a messy bun on the back of her head, and was wearing a modest collared dress printed with a pattern of seeds, saplings, and leaves. The way she moved, some of the leaves almost seemed to be rustling on their own.

Carlos stood up so fast he knocked over his chair. "Ms. Frizzle!"

Aunt Valerie turned, studied his face for a moment, then broke into a smile. "Can it be? Is it really little Carlos Ramon?"

"You..." Carlos thrust out his arm and pointed a trembling finger at her. "You turned me into a bat!"

"Oh, Carlos, I can see we have so much to catch up on!" said Valerie Frizzle, beaming at him. "But not this minute. It's been a long trip, and I've been promised a cold drink." She started on toward the kitchen again, addressing the kids: "There's so much I've always found fascinating about ice cubes...."

Cecil peeled away from the group to rejoin his boyfriend. He squeezed Carlos' still-kind-of-shaky arm with both hands, and, at the same time, picked up Carlos' chair with...okay, those were definitely tentacles. Where had he even been keeping them? "Carlos! You didn't tell me you'd met my aunt before."

"Well, I didn't know she was your aunt until just now," said Carlos weakly. "Although, in light of all these memories I'm suddenly un-repressing? It makes _so much sense_."

"Did she really turn your class into bats?" piped up Stephen, appearing next to Jon. "What was that like?"

Carlos thought about it.

Then he held his cupped hands on either side of his head, waggled them for emphasis, and said, "Ear-y."

Everyone at their table groaned. " _Carlos!_ "

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The _Colbert Report_ segments Jon refers to: [wheat taking over the studio](http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/426875/june-05-2013/monsanto-s-modified-wheat); any of several with [the Starbucks under the desk](http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/177511/july-23-2008/starbucks-closings); [growing extra hands](http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/212025/december-03-2008/nasa-spider-escapes).
> 
> Too many Night Vale references to list. [Canon is free to download](http://commonplacebooks.com/welcome-to-night-vale/), and [fan-made transcripts are readily available](http://erinptah.com/NightValeTranscripts.html).
> 
> Carlos is remembering _The Magic School Bus_ episode 2x17, "Going Batty." Not freely available anywhere, alas. (The whole series is on Netflix, though, if you have it.)


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jon bonds with Carlos as the only other normal person in a weird, weird group. Cecil wants to hear more about Carlos' childhood, and not just the magical adventures, either. And when Stephen gets picked on, the Friz decides to turn it into a learning opportunity.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now with matching artwork: ["This explains SO MUCH."](http://sailorptah.deviantart.com/art/Welcome-to-Aunt-Valerie-402969912)
> 
> And if you liked that, try this too: [Scientific showing-off.](http://sailorptah.deviantart.com/art/He-Blinded-Me-With-Science-400594605)

As usual, Cecil joined Carlos in the shower that night. Neither of them was feeling particularly frisky, especially after they'd been traveling all morning; it was just that Cecil had a major thing for washing Carlos' hair, and Carlos was happy to indulge it.

"I'm still remembering something new every fifteen minutes or so," he said wonderingly, eyes closed as Cecil lathered up his scalp. "It's so weird. There are things I've known this whole time — like, I knew I played soccer in elementary school — but then I had completely blanked out on the fact that we picked our mascot by getting shrunk in the middle of a swamp and having some giant butterflies scare the daylights out of us."

Cecil shuddered. "They didn't eat any of you, did they?"

"What? Of course not!" spluttered Carlos. "They were just butterflies, they don't...." He trailed off, realizing that he had yet to actually run into any Night Vale butterflies. "Where _I_ grew up, butterflies feed on nectar. Sometimes pollen, or rotting fruit, but they're definitely not predators."

"If you say so," said Cecil dubiously. There was still a touch of possessiveness in the way he massaged Carlos' roots, like he was afraid a rogue caterpillar might burst in and try to steal his boyfriend. "You played soccer, you said? Did you like it?"

Carlos shrugged. "Sure, I guess. It wasn't anything special. Everyone at our school had to play something, and, you know, we weren't bad for eight-year-olds but we weren't that exciting to anyone but our parents, either. Now, the time the bus turned into a submarine...that was exciting! I can't believe I never told the family. We all sort of understood that the bus had to be protected, but you'd think it would have slipped out at some point that I'd spent an afternoon in a diving suit fifteen hundred meters below sea level."

"Yes, oceans, I understand they're very interesting." Cecil nudged Carlos forward so his head was directly under the spray. "I want to hear more about you, though! What were you like as a child? Was your perfection already in full flower, or did you still have a metamorphosis to go to before you got there?"

It was useless to try to argue Cecil out of the "perfect" descriptor, but Carlos made a token effort. "I was average, I swear. Goofed off in class a lot...I got decent grades, just not amazing ones. Mike was the family genius, he could already do crazy things with computers when I was still figuring out how erosion worked. And I went through this terrible pun phrase around third grade! My dad was always making them, and back then I thought they were the most hilarious thing ever."

"You sound _perfectly_ adorable," said Cecil stubbornly. "I bet your class loved you."

"We all pretty much got along that year." Carlos had to smile as their faces flashed across his mind. "We were a quirky bunch — I never forgot that part! Dorothy Ann always had a couple of books on her to do extra research...I used to get on her case about that, and then I ended up reading one of her books on volcanoes, and couldn't put it down."

"And two decades later you were doing seismology research that ended up leading you to Night Vale! I should really track down this Dorothy Ann person and send her a thank-you card."

"Tim sometimes drew comics and put all of us in them," continued Carlos. "Phoebe was kind of shy, but if there were animals in trouble she could step up and take charge, and it wasn't just the cuddly or the pretty ones, she would defend snakes and spiders too. Phil...."

Whatever had been on the tip of his tongue slipped away. He trailed off, confused.

"Yes?" prompted Cecil. He tugged Carlos back out of the spray, smoothing the fully-rinsed locks back from his forehead so he could open his eyes again. "What did Phil do?"

Carlos stared at the pretty faux-stonework pattern of the shower tiles. It didn't give him any clues. "I don't think we had a Phil. Not that year. I must be mixing it up with another grade."

"Well, that's all right." Cecil opened a bottle of some kind of gel, and the bathroom was filled with a flowery scent as he worked this into Carlos' hair next. Something from the _Violaceae_ family, if Carlos had his chemical compounds straight. "I want to hear more about you anyway."

Fair enough. No reason to dwell on not remembering his exact elementary-school classmates. "Um....I mentioned the soccer, the goofing off, the puns...oh! I played an instrument."

"How wonderful! Which one?"

"One that I made up," admitted Carlos sheepishly. "Built it from junk out of the garage. It sounded kind of stupid even when I got it working, but the Friz — uh, I mean, your aunt — was totally encouraging." There'd been a field trip involved in figuring it out, but he didn't think Cecil would be wowed by the story of a museum where the books had sounds in them instead of words. That had happened in Night Vale twice already this year.

"That's just like her," cooed Cecil. "And just like _you_ , my daring, innovative Carlos."

"All I did was reinvent the wheel, I swear." After leading the rest of the class on a chase around a clearly-haunted museum, beset by a dimensional anomaly that made it bigger on the inside, in the dead of night, all to figure out the basic properties of sound waves. "And I wasn't daring, I just ran into situations without stopping to think how they might be dangerous."

Cecil wasn't even washing anymore, just carding his fingers (and a couple of small tentacles) through Carlos' now-silky-smooth locks. "Oh, of course. Which is _totally_ different from how you are now."

"Yes, it is," deadpanned Carlos right back at him. "Now I give the dangerous situations a thorough scientific analysis before running into them."

 

///

 

"So, uh," said Jon, as they were changing for bed. "Just out of idle curiosity...you don't have any un-manifested tentacles tucked away anywhere yourself, do you?"

"No tentacles," said Stephen. "Although I can borrow some of Cousin Cecil's if you're interested."

Jon made a face. "Oh, geez, seriously? You don't know where those things have been."

Pause.

"I know one place they've been," said Stephen darkly, at the same time as Jon said, "Okay, I know, shut up, I know!"

He sat on the edge of the bed and tried one more time to check his email. When he tried to connect his laptop to the cabins' network and load Gmail, all he got was a black screen with the words "ACCESS DENIED. YOU HAVE (4) ATTEMPTS REMAINING BEFORE MANDATORY RE-EDUCATION" in bright red, and his phone wasn't getting a signal at all. So much for that idea.

Stephen had lain down beside him. Jon put the phone away and said, "Can I ask what Cecil looks like to you?"

"It's hard to describe," said Stephen. As Jon was imagining all kinds of extradimensional Lovecraftian non-Euclidean impossibilities, Stephen continued: "He isn't really tall. But he isn't exactly short, either. He isn't thin...not that I'd call him fat. You know I don't see race, but I can tell you he doesn't have light skin." He considered this. "Or dark skin. Um, he has a face? Two eyes, a nose...."

"Well, gee, that clears everything up," sighed Jon. "Let me guess, his hair is neither short nor long, and it's roughly hair-colored."

"How did you know?!"

"Lucky guess." Jon always tried not to let it go to his head when he wowed his boyfriend with basic feats of Earth logic. "Do you see at least see the purple eyes?"

"No, those are white. All the way through — white iris, white pupils. It's very Storm from the X-Men," said Stephen. "It's such a pain, let me tell you. If I don't have my third eye open I can't tell which direction he's looking."

Right, the extra eye. Between everything else he'd had to keep up with today, Jon hadn't actually gotten a chance to sit down and process that.

"C'mere a second, okay?" he said, gesturing for Stephen to sit up.

The mattress squeaked as Stephen obeyed. Jon cupped his face in one hand to steady it and gazed into the eye set into his forehead.

It was the same warm brown as the other two, with the same long lashes. The symmetry of its setting was a little disconcerting — both corners were "outer" corners, and Jon couldn't see any tear ducts — and it didn't come with a third eyebrow, since his hairline was right there anyway. But for the most part it looked natural. Pretty, even.

All three eyes blinked at him, and Stephen's aggressive self-assurance cracked a little. "It isn't...too weird, is it?"

"It isn't _bad_ weird," said Jon, dropping a quick kiss on his temple. "You, um, you could keep it open when we get back home, when it's just me around. If you want. If it's a pain to keep it closed all the time."

"Completely unnecessary," huffed Stephen. "It's much easier to have it closed when I'm outside of Weird America. People like you can't imagine what it looks like out there sometimes! It's insane."

"All right, all right! Sorry, I didn't know."

As Jon was getting comfortable on the pillow, though, Stephen curled up against his side and said in a low voice, "But thank you for offering."

 

\\\\\

 

Another flood of returning images snapped Carlos out of sleep. Heart pounding, he shook his boyfriend's shoulder. "Cecil. Cecil!"

"Huh? Whazzah?" asked Cecil sleepily.

Carlos grinned in the darkness. "I've been to Mars!"

"What...jus' now?"

"No, no, when I was a kid. With your aunt. On a field trip." On an _interplanetary voyage._ He'd been able to take great bounding leaps across rust-tinted soil; he'd stood at the edges of craters and gazed firsthand at distant unearthly mountains. Even though he knew the planet was only about half the diameter of Earth, the horizon in his memory was impossibly large, because the sun, the only point of reference his mind could get a handle on, was so small and cold against it....

"Oh...yeah, she does that," mumbled Cecil. "Izzat all?"

Carlos sank back onto his side of the bed. He probably deserved it — he'd boosted own ego a couple of times by astounding Cecil with basic color-changing chemical reactions, which was just asking for something like this to balance it out — but it still kind of stung. _Mars._ "Yeah, that's all. Go ahead and go back to sleep."

 

///

 

When Jon wandered into their cabin's kitchenette the next morning, shaved and dressed but still pretty out of it, he found Carlos standing over the stove frying something. "Morning, Carlos. You know if there's non-deadly coffee around here? And maybe some breakfast foods too?"

Carlos gestured to the coffee machine. "The can with the label that isn't backwards or in hieroglyphics is the one I brought, so that's safe. Help yourself. And I can fry you up an extra serving of this, if you want. It's ham and eggs."

"Would you? That would be tremendous."

Stephen found his way in while Jon was in the middle of figuring out the coffee machine, just in time to see it sprout spidery mechanical legs and try to run away. "Bad! Stay!" he ordered, smacking it across the lid while Jon stared in frozen astonishment. "You have to be firm with them, Jon."

"Uh, sure. I'll keep it in mind."

"And make me a mug of this while you're at it," added Stephen, tapping the can labeled in hieroglyphics, before he went to raid the cupboard.

Jon did finally get his coffee. Stephen poured himself a bowl of what appeared to be Cheerios, except that they sparked like Pop Rocks when he chewed. He was, Jon noticed as the caffeine kicked in, wearing his high-collared dressage shirt and cream-colored jodhpurs. Either there was horseback riding on the agenda for the day, or he just wanted an excuse to wear the tiara that went with them.

At last Carlos announced, "Eggs are up." He already had plates out, so he flipped a serving of ham and eggs onto one of them and passed it to Jon.

"Thanks," said Jon. "Wait, um...they're supposed to be green, right?"

 

\\\\\

 

Cecil (today in a fringed T-shirt and checkered culottes) manifested every one of his tentacles for a massive wrestling match with half a dozen of his smallest nieces and nephews. There was a lot of shrieking and growling and giggling as the kids let loose with their own weird features, including a curly-haired boy who had tentacles of his own (sky-blue, in contrast to Cecil's deep purple) and a ponytailed girl who kept spitting fire.

The fight took up most of the floor in the main cabin's sitting room. Anyone who wanted to get through from the front to the kitchen had to either squeeze past on the sides, or give up and walk around outside. Carlos watched from a chair crammed into one corner; it still probably wasn't the safest place for an ordinary human, but he was too charmed to leave the room entirely.

(At first he worried about the children who looked no more supernatural than he did. When the normal girl in the rainbow sweater gleefully sliced open one of Cecil's tentacles with a grappling-hook gun, he realized he could probably relax.)

"Enjoying yourself?" asked a gentle voice, and Carlos realized with a start that the Friz was sitting beside him, in an armchair the same model as his but colored a suspiciously bright yellow. She was wearing another of her trademark dresses with a pattern of brown scales, and a series of brightly-colored frogs lining the cuffs of her sleeves and the hem of her skirt. The ensemble was completed by frog-eyeball earrings.

"I've never seen Cecil interact this much with kids before, that's all," said Carlos sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck. "I mean, excluding the voiceless zombie-child messengers of the City Council. I'm not sure they're a fair representative sample."

A blast from the fire-breathing girl caught on a patch of carpet, which flared up in smoke and flame. Cecil effortlessly curled one tentacle around a pantaloon-wearing child in the danger zone and lifted him out of the way, then stamped out the fire with another.

"He's really good with them," said Carlos, half to himself. Then, "I'm sorry, I'm being very...um, what should I call you? I can't just keep addressing you as Ms. Frizzle, right? Especially since there are probably other people from the Frizzle branch of the family around here."

"Dynamic deduction, Carlos!" said his former teacher — and, good grief, Carlos was a capable independent adult in his mid-thirties who had published serious papers that were well-received by the seismotectonics community, but that simple phrase still made him exactly as fulfilled as it had when he was nine. "Of course you can always call me Valerie. But if that's too informal for you to adjust to right away, you're welcome to call me Aunt Valerie, too."

Carlos grinned with relief. "Aunt Valerie it is." His actual parents' sisters were all _tías_ , so it didn't feel as over-familial as it might have. "And I've been meaning to ask you, is Liz still around too?" The _Trioceros jacksonii_ was only supposed to live a decade or so in captivity, but then the _Trioceros jacksonii_ wasn't supposed to be able to drive a bus, so anything was possible.

"Let me think...Liz, Liz, Liz." Aunt Valerie tapped her chin, remembering. "The person you're thinking of would have been my TA at the time, gone on to a respectable teaching position herself if she...ah, of course! Your class had Liz McDaniels. We haven't touched base in some time, but last I heard she was doing quite well."

"McDaniels," echoed Carlos. "Liz was a dragon."

"But of course! I would never entrust my class — not to mention my bus — to an actual chameleon."

"Well, no. In retrospect, we probably should have guessed...."

"They can't follow road cues," continued Aunt Valerie, "and they're notoriously bad at signaling."

 

///

 

Jon tapped out of the adults' informal backyard soccer game early. He couldn't run like he used to, and it didn't seem like a fair match when some of the folks on the other team could fly. (Not to mention the fact that, by majority vote, it had been decided that Cecil was still allowed to use his tentacles.)

Carlos was drawing on the front porch again, so Jon retrieved his mini laptop and took the next seat over. "Hey, I don't suppose you've had any trouble with the Internet here? And if so, any chance you've figured out a way to get around it?"

"I know how to bypass the censors in Night Vale, but I haven't tried it here yet," admitted Carlos, putting down the paper notebook to take the computer out of Jon's hands. "I can give it a try. What are you trying to get to, the news?"

"Oh, no. When I'm on vacation, I make a point of avoiding the news as long as I can get away with it," said Jon. "Email. It's not that big a deal, since we're only here for a few days anyway, but I was hoping to drop my wife a line at some point and tell her everything's going okay."

He said it without thinking. Anywhere else, it was his relationship with Stephen that he would have quietly downplayed. Here, Carlos did a double-take. "You're still...? Sorry, I thought...you and Cousin Stephen...."

Right. Well. Might as well just put it all out there. "We are. I am. It's a polyamory thing, okay? Out in, uh, the real world, it's mostly an open secret — anyone who really wants to can go right ahead and believe it's not happening — but everyone who's directly involved is aware of it. And approves of it."

Carlos' face was carefully blank as he processed the idea. Jon found himself half-consciously shifting into his Serious Newsman lean-in, hands folded as he looked the other man directly in the eye.

"Stephen was sure it wouldn't be a big deal here," he continued. "This trip was really important to him because this is the only group where he doesn't have to hold anything back. Our friends at home don't know much about the supernatural stuff, and when it comes to relationship stuff, the other side of his family is convinced we're going to hell for the gay part alone. So, listen, if you want to judge me, have at it, but don't bother Stephen about it, all right?"

It took a moment for Carlos to absorb all that.

But when it sunk in, what he said was, "I have an acquaintance who's a five-headed dragon, which I think makes all his relationships polyamory by default. Also...I have family who thinks I'm going to hell for the gay stuff too. So. What email provider are you using?"

He never did crack the firewalls. And they both agreed to stop for Jon's safety when the error message got to (1) ATTEMPT REMAINING BEFORE MANDATORY RE-EDUCATION.

By that point, though, they were deep in conversation about more of the weird science in Night Vale. Highlights included the wheat (and, Carlos stressed, its by-products) that turned into snakes; the deadly levels of radiation that were business as usual at Cecil's studio; and the house that didn't exist, though all the evidence suggested it really should.

"You must have been into some kind of normal scientific field before you moved there, right?" asked Jon.

"Did I ever," sighed Carlos. "Seismology. With a focus in seismotectonics." Catching what was undoubtedly a deer-in-headlights look on Jon's face, he added. "It's the study of how plate tectonics and local faults affect earthquakes in a given area. I have a couple papers available in _PLOS ONE_ , if you ever care enough to look up the specifics."

"Okay, be honest with me. Would I understand any of them? And keep in mind that I tell dick jokes for a living."

"They're pretty technical," admitted Carlos. Behind the lenses of his glasses, his eyes sparkled. "Guess you'll just have to trust me when I say they're...ground-breaking."

Jon groaned. " _Carlos!_ "

 

\\\\\

 

In the hour or so leading up to dinner, a good part of the younger generation ended up in the main cabin playing board and/or card games. (The obligatory kid who ignored everything else in favor of reading ended up in the chair next to the Monopoly game. The leather binding of her book, Carlos noticed, was smoking slightly. Cecil assured him it wasn't a problem.)

The adults present included Cecil and Aunt Valerie, both playing with the kids; Cousin Stephen, apparently playing at the same level as the kids; and Jon, who confessed to Carlos that he was mostly there to make sure Stephen didn't throw any tantrums if he lost. Carlos himself had gotten fed up with drawing leaves, and was now taking advantage of the glory of pens to document all the differences in these games from the versions he was familiar with.

(There were easy-to-understand changes, like how the Scrabble set included Sumerian runes, and more confusing ones. He had no idea what was in the 'Bloodstone Circle' stack of cards on the Monopoly board.)

So this was the scene when a girl with dark plaits and hollow, sunken eyes (it wasn't a goth fashion choice or anything, the black lacy Victorian dresses notwithstanding; her face was just built that way) plopped down next to Stephen and said, "Uncle Stephen, how come you've got three eyes?"

"I don't know," said Stephen testily. "How come you've got only two, huh?"

"Because _everyone_ has two per head, and I only have one head," said the natural-goth girl. "So how come you have three? Three is _weird_."

"Are you sure about that, Friday?" cut in Aunt Valerie. "Two eyes per head is the only way to be normal? Nothing else found anywhere in nature?"

"Well...spiders, maybe," said young Friday sullenly. "But I never seen anything else on an animal."

"Never say never, kids!" exclaimed the Friz. "If you haven't personally seen something, that just means you have a perfect reason to go looking. In fact, let's do that right now. To the bus!"

She jumped to her feet, and kids all over the room abandoned their games and followed with a cheer. Even the girl with the book closed it, tucked it under her arm, and joined the crowd. Cousin Stephen, beaming, grabbed Jon's hands and pulled him out of his chair. "Come on, Jon! You don't want to miss this!"

Grinning pretty hard himself, Carlos dropped the notebook and pen in a pocket of his casual lab coat and practically skipped over to the Scrabble board. "Let's go!" he exclaimed, reaching for Cecil's hands to lift him off the floor.

Instead, Cecil locked a hand and a tentacle around his wrists, and added a couple of other tentacles to yank Carlos down with an _oof_ into his lap.

"Cecil? What's going on? They're gonna leave without us...."

Cradling him in an unusually firm grip, Cecil fixed him with a stern look. "We promised Aunt Morticia we'd help with dinner."

"But...!" protested Carlos. They could do that afterward, surely? "Science...your aunt...the bus... _field trip!_ "

"You, Carlos...daring, perfect, occasionally insensitive Carlos...have already been on enough of Aunt Valerie's field trips to last a lifetime," said Cecil. "Besides, science always works her up an appetite. This is your chance to show some appreciation by having a balanced meal waiting on the table when she gets back."

 

///

 

The kids, plus Jon and Stephen, were bursting with excitement as they piled into the back yard fresh off their ride on the bus. Dinner was almost all laid out on the picnic tables, with Cousin BJ teleporting from spot to spot in little puffs of smoke to put down the last of the silverware.

"So lots of animals have a third eye, called the parietal eye!" exclaimed the girl with the book (which had stopped smoking, at least for the moment). "Lizards, frogs, tuataras, and some kinds of fish, including lots of sharks!"

"Parietal eyes aren't as developed as main eyes, but they still sense light, and have lots of different uses," continued Friday, skipping along next to Aunt Valerie. "They keep track of the seasons based on the amount of sunlight, and use that to control things like when to get sleepy, and how much of different kinds of hormones to produce."

"And mammals like us still have the gland in our brains that a parietal eye would be attached to," said Jon. "They're even made of cells that are a lot like the cells in our retinas. So I guess you could say we all have third eyes!"

"As I always say," put in Aunt Valerie, "if you've gotta see...why not have three?"

While the children split off into groups or ran to find their parents and relate their adventure in more detail, Jon stumbled to a stop and leaned on the chair Carlos had reserved with his notebook, blinking, weirdly dazed. "Did we just recap the whole trip?" he asked Stephen under his breath. "Why did we do that?"

"Perfectly normal side effect. It wears off fast, don't worry," said Stephen. "Ooh, quesadillas!"

"Mostly safe!" called Carlos from the far end of their table. "Jon, don't eat the blue ones." He finished sticking serving spoons in the tureens and hurried over. "So how was the trip? What did the bus do? Grow, shrink, fly, swim, tunnel...?"

"I think the highlight was the point when it transformed into a tuna," said Jon. "With us inside it."

A wistful smile lit up Carlos' face. "At my old school, the bus was _always_ turning into animals when we were inside it."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NASA has photos of [the sunset on Mars](http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/spirit/20050610a.html).
> 
> Carlos is remembering episode 2x03 "Butterfly and the Bog Beast," the book _The Magic School Bus On the Ocean Floor_ , episodes 2x01 "Blows Its Top," 1x08 "In the Haunted House," and 1x01 "Gets Lost in Space." The first book in the series was published in 1986, so I'm using that as the year Carlos started third grade (making him 35 in 2013).
> 
> From TCR: Stephen's [dressage uniform](http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/417193/july-31-2012/stephen-s-dressage-training-pt--2).
> 
> If you like this fic, here are some other crossover fanworks you might like: [a mysterious bus visits Night Vale](http://archiveofourown.org/works/920176); [Carlos and his scientists](http://walkinganddead.tumblr.com/post/59395075896/carlos-and-his-team-of-scientists); [Ms. Frizzle's latest dress](http://musewhimsy.deviantart.com/art/Ms-Frizzle-in-Night-Vale-396101086); [Stephen on community television](http://sailorptah.deviantart.com/art/Night-Vale-Community-Television-396164762); [Night Vale as a TV show in NYC](http://dailyreportsfromlastnight.tumblr.com/post/60100134214/welcome-to-night-vale-the-au-where-its-a-tv-show). Know of any more? Drop me a link!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some late-night drinking with relatives; a trip to the beach; voice-based Science being done on Cecil and Stephen; and more headaches for Carlos and Jon. Even the most protective supernatural news reporters can't shield their fearless fact-seeking boyfriends from everything.

Cecil swore up and down that this brand of wine was entirely non-toxic, even to the cyanide-intolerant. By his third glass, Carlos was having his doubts. It seemed pretty clearly to be turning his brain into soup.

With the younger kids in bed and most of the rest of the family watching _Little Shop of Horrors_ in the main cabin, a small group of them had convened in the living room of a secondary cabin to break out the drinks. Cecil had perched himself on the arm of Carlos' chair, in what seemed like an increasingly impressive feat of balance. Carlos was expounding on all the trouble they'd had connecting to email providers, trying to sit up straight rather than lean on Cecil and only half succeeding, when Cecil said, "Why don't you just use Twitter?"

"Dunno," said Carlos. "Jon, Cecil says —"

"Don't have a Twitter," interrupted Jon, who was, after all, on couch right next to them. He had surrendered to gravity long ago and was lying prone across the cushions, head in Stephen's lap. "Don't...barely have a Facebook. 'M an old, old man."

"I'm on it," said Stephen, whipping out his phone from what appeared to be thin air.

"No phones," Carlos told him. "We're not getting signals. Prob'ly the mountain."

With a fond laugh, Cecil patted him on the head. "Right, sweetie. The 'mountain'."

"Hah! It loaded!" crowed Stephen. "Shows what _you_ know. Twitter, it's, Twitter is _everywhere_. Guess your 'science' doesn't know everything!"

Carlos couldn't even bring himself to be upset. "'Saright. I'm used to it."

Still smirking in triumph, Stephen spent at least five minutes hunting and pecking on the phone screen before Jon took it out of his hands. "Maybe you should do that tomorrow, babe."

"And how is your own wife doing, Cousin Stephen?" put in Cecil. "I haven't heard from her in a while."

Stephen shrugged. "Yeah, me neither."

Which, if it was anything like a Night Vale relationship, meant only one thing. "'M sorry," said Carlos.

"No, she's probably fine," Jon told him. "It wasn't...they never...it was a marriage because of reasons. Stephen still wanted to look heta...het'roshex...straight, an' she needed to be a legal immigrant. Immigrant to the US. From...whatsit. Tiny European place, no one's ever heard of."

"Luftnarp," supplied Stephen.

"Yeah. That."

"Beautiful country, Luftnarp," sighed Cecil. "If you ever have a chance to visit, don't miss it. Tiny little corner of the Alps, easy to fly right past, but the people are so lovely."

Something about that touched off a spark in the soup that had been Carlos' brain. He slumped against his boyfriend's side. "Cecil. Cecil."

"Yes, perfect Carlos?" murmured Cecil, smoothing a lock of hair back behind his ear.

"You said it's in the Alps," said Carlos. "The Alps are _mountains_."

Cecil sighed again. "Sweet Carlos, I think perhaps you've had enough for tonight. Let's get you to bed, okay?"

"But...!" protested Carlos, though he didn't quite have it in him to struggle as Cecil helped him to his feet. "But, Cecil...geology...fault lines...'course the Alps are mountains, they're on th' biggest, the biggest orogenic belt on th' planet. Compressional forces. Anticlines! Aunt Valerie, tell him!"

Aunt Valerie didn't seem to hear him. In a fitted blouse and slacks that were printed with green and purple grapes, accented by shimmery wine-glass earrings, she was giggling softly and singing to herself, "The wheels on the bus go round~and~round~...."

"Sounds like it's time for you to hit the sack too, Aunt Val," said Cousin BJ. A burlap sack briefly popped into existence beside him; he gave it a punch, and it disappeared. "Here, lemme give you a lift. Night, everyone!" He linked his arm through hers, and with a _poof_ of yellowish smoke they both vanished too.

"That is not at all scientific," complained Carlos, as Cecil escorted him stumbling down the hall to their own room. "Buuuuut it was pretty funny."

 

///

 

Turned out there was a beach nearby after all. A contingent of the family suited up and walked through the forest to reach it the next afternoon, hauling coolers and picnic baskets full of lunch, along with towels and water wings and a couple of inflatable sea monsters to paddle around in.

Jon found himself keeping a safe distance from the water. Apparently he was still a little shaken up from being inside the tuna-shaped bus when it almost got eaten by a shark.

It didn't stop him from enjoying himself. He did some reading, played a little Frisbee, sat back to appreciate the sight of a shirtless Stephen running after a beach ball...and, let's be real here, appreciated the view when the ball got thrown to Carlos, too.

Jon had figured that, in the name of fairness, Carlos' stunningly handsome face ought to be balanced out by a fair-to-middling torso, maybe a set of legs that were nothing much to look at. Yeah, that was _so_ not the case. He considered himself a reasonable man, and he was already madly in love with two people who made him happier than anything, but in that moment he couldn't help understanding Stephen's burning fury at Cousin Cecil. Just a bit.

The outing changed direction when Stephen got smacked in the face with the beach ball. He abandoned the game in tears, fleeing to the shade of Jon's umbrella for comfort; Jon had to reassure him that no, it hadn't left a mark, and yes, Jon would still love him even if it had. It calmed him down, but clearly he wouldn't be happy until he got back in front of a mirror and could check for himself.

"It's okay, don't worry, we can go back to the houses," Jon assured him, brushing salt-dried sand from his skin. "Uh, as long as you remember the way, because I sure don't."

Stephen didn't. Carlos did, though, and insisted it was no trouble, really, he'd been ready to leave anyway. Jon folded up the umbrella and Stephen gathered up their towels while Carlos (in a huge relief to Jon's hormones) put his shirt back on.

"I'm kind of surprised Cecil didn't come along," said Jon as they made their way up the leaf-strewn path. "All those tentacles he has...well, when he feels like manifesting them, anyway...you'd think he'd have a great time in the ocean."

"Common misconception, Jon," said Stephen, who wasn't too traumatized to be arch. "The tentacles only mean that he's the Voice of Night Vale. Which, as you might recall, is in the middle of a desert."

"Wait, I didn't know that," said Carlos from ahead of them.

"Really? I thought you lived there."

"Not the desert part! The other part." Twigs crunched under Carlos' sandals. "Are you saying he got the tentacles when he got the job, or that he was given the job because he already had the tentacles?"

"You science people and your linear time," huffed Stephen. "As soon as he got the job, he had always had the tentacles. Is that so hard to understand?"

"I'll just take your word for it," said Carlos with a sigh. They came to a fork in the path, around a tree that as far as Jon could tell was a giant redwood, and swung to the right. "And yeah, I'm not surprised he stayed out of this one. Cecil doesn't trust any body of water bigger than a swimming pool. The kid with the tentacles, on the other hand...Stephen, he's your nephew, you'd know better than me, but I thought I heard his family was from Dunwich, Massachusetts, right? Which is right there on the river, and not a long drive from the coast."

"Wait, there's a kid with tentacles too?" asked Jon.

"Haven't you seen him? About yea high, dark skin, the tentacles are sky blue and almost as long as his arms...he was on the field trip, you must have noticed him at some point."

Jon tried to remember. It wasn't ringing any bells. Also, he was getting a headache. He adjusted his grip on the umbrella so he could massage his temples.

Carlos came to a stop. "You okay?"

"Fine, fine. Probably just dehydrated. I kinda forgot to bring a water bottle," said Jon sheepishly. "The sooner we get back, the sooner I can get a drink. Which way do we go next?"

There was a worryingly long pause as Carlos studied the trees and brush in front of them.

Then he said, "Okay, I think we made a wrong turn somewhere. But I knew exactly where we were a few minutes ago, so all we have to do is backtrack...."

Stephen cut him off. "No point. It's not your fault, it's the trees — they're moving behind our backs — see, Jon, this is what happens when you go soft on the environment! It starts thinking it can push you around. Stand back, I'll handle this one."

With a few imperious gestures he lined up Carlos and Jon so they were facing him, a personal audience of two. He stood straight, adjusted an imaginary tie, and fixed all three eyes on a nonexistent camera over Jon's left shoulder.

"Tonight's Wørd: Forests!" he announced, in the clear, ringing voice he used on TV. "What, exactly, are they good for? Writing paper? Packing materials? That's what we have the Internet and styrofoam for! And, think about it, Nation: aren't all these open woods kind of a fire hazard? All that underbrush, nice and dry, just waiting to catch a good flame...the ground so hot and parched thanks to global warming that there's not a single damp patch to slow it down...and once you get a real good inferno going, even the big trees can char all the way through to the —"

He was cut off by a massive snapping of branches, loud as gunshots. A rumble went through the ground beneath their feet, sending shudders through every leaf and every vine. Up in the canopy, a flock of birds erupted out of the branches and took off into the sky with unearthly screeches and a mighty beating of wings. All three men ducked, Jon trying to wield the folded-up umbrella like a misshapen shield in case anything fell on them.

Nothing did. As the commotion died down and Jon got brave enough to raise his head again, he spotted a familiar silhouette through the beeches and pines. "Hey...isn't that one of our cabins?"

Stephen smirked. "Colbert, 1; nature, 0."

 

\\\\\

 

Carlos was in their room, deeply absorbed in the laptop propped against his knees, when Cecil rapped lightly on the doorjamb to get his attention. "A bunch of people are going to pile in the vans and drive into town for the Olive Garden dinner special. Do you want to come, or are you busy with science?"

"Nothing I can't pick up later," said Carlos, a little reluctant, but willing to get over it. "I can go if you're going."

"No, it's perfectly all right! I was looking forward to having leftovers. I just hope I can get to Aunt Morticia's biscuits before someone else gets the last of them," said Cecil. "What are you working on? Can I see?"

"Of course! Come on over and sit down." Carlos patted the bed beside him.

Today Cecil was wearing one of his more normal outfits: a powder-blue polo shirt, dark slacks, dark suspenders with a Night Vale Community Radio pin. With his tentacles non-manifested, and absolutely nothing glowing, he could have been any random guy off the street. According to Carlos' research — and, gosh, how smug DA would be if she could see him now — that was more or less how everyone perceived him: as someone who fell within their mental boundaries for "just some guy." (Hiram McDaniels was always recommending Cecil try different brands of scale polish.)

Of course, any impression that he was "ordinary" vanished the instant you heard him talk.

"I've been pulling up random clips off the _Colbert Report_ website," said Carlos, as his unique, inscrutable Cecil leaned against his side and got a look at the screen. "The _Daily Show_ site is blocked by the censors, but Stephen's isn't. I, um, I actually have a hypothesis that there's no way to block it anywhere in America. Especially not in Weird America. Maybe we could go on a road trip some time and test it out?"

"It isn't easy for me to get time off," Cecil reminded him, clearly not confused about where Carlos' hypothesis might have come from. "But we can try to work something out."

"So he really is the Voice of America."

"Well, yes. Something like that." Cecil slung an arm over Carlos' shoulders and started twirling a couple of fingers in his hair. "That was never...I would have told you if I knew you were interested. Did you think it was a secret?"

"I wasn't sure," admitted Carlos. "You don't always tell me things, you know."

"I don't always know what basic facts your education skipped over! I'm sure Aunt Valerie's class was a big help in that regard, but there's obviously a lot it didn't cover. And sweet Carlos, when I do keep things from you, it's only for your own health and sanity."

This had generally turned out to be true, so Carlos didn't fight with him over it. "Well, for future reference, I'm always interested to know about other Voices. Remember the acoustic analysis I've been doing on your show?" He clicked over to a different window, showing a close-up on the digitized sound waves of Stephen introducing a "Better Know A District" segment. "I've been doing the same with Stephen's. And if I had even more subjects to get samples from, it would make any results I get that much better."

"Oh," said Cecil. He sounded disappointed.

"Something wrong?"

Cecil shrugged against him. "Nothing! My own fault. I must have mistakenly gotten a wrong impression when you said you were doing 'experiments' involving my voice being 'special'."

Carlos thought about this. Then he thought about it in more detail. Then all the blood in his body rushed to his face.

Then he said, "Hey, Cecil?"

"Yes, dear Carlos?"

"We're not in any rush to eat, right? Or to get back to the rest of the family for any other reason?" There was a clock in the corner of his laptop screen, of course, but Carlos had fallen out of the habit of relying on clocks months ago.

"I suppose not," said Cecil. "Why?"

Carlos closed the laptop and set it aside. "In that case...what do you say we spend a little time with me doing something I _don't_ want to do with any Voice that isn't from Night Vale?"

A thrilling little shiver ran through Cecil. "Oh, Carlos, that sounds...wait. We are talking about sex here, right?"

"...That's the idea, yeah." He'd been trying to go for suave and subtle, but come to think of it, with a cultural disconnect like theirs it was probably best to be as literal as possible.

The next thing Carlos knew, Cecil had climbed into his vacated lap and had both hands tangled in his hair. "Then I say...yes," declared Cecil, dropping into the deeper timbre of his radio voice as he drew Carlos in for a kiss. "Yes, my Carlos, yes."

 

///

 

All the caution Jon had taken around Colbert/Palmer/Frizzle/Addams/and-so-on home cooking, and it ended up being the chicken alfredo at the Olive Garden that got him sick.

Just looking at the vehicles their party had ridden over in made him feel queasy all over again. Especially Cousin BJ's van, which was a nauseating shade of green, with a skull-shaped hood ornament that was more realistic than it had any right to be. "Aunt Valerie!" demanded Stephen. "Help us out, here!"

The magic bus hadn't been with them on the way down here, and Jon didn't want to make her go all the way up and back just to give him a smoother ride. "It's okay, you don't have to...."

"Oh, I insist!" said Aunt Valerie, and clicked her keyring. A cheerful _beep-beep!_ rang out from the far end of the parking lot. "Just give me a minute to set 'er up."

Jon sat on the curb with Stephen while she swished over to the bus, amoeba-patterned skirt rippling behind her.

The engine revved, and the whole vehicle rearranged itself in a way that shouldn't have been possible in only three dimensions. It was lower-slung and all-around sleeker as it rolled up to them, door popping open on its own. "All aboard!" trilled Aunt Valerie from the driver's seat, inviting them into an interior that looked more like a first-class international flight than anything Jon had ever seen serving a school. The seats were wide and reclining and bed-size. One of them was equipped with a couple of handy plastic-lined bags.

Jon lay down in that one, while Stephen took the seat directly behind his aunt and perched on the edge, the better to lean on the back of her chair and talk with her. It didn't seem like a conversation that needed Jon's input, so he mostly tuned it out.

The ride was dreamily smooth. Somehow the bus even managed to drop them off directly _inside_ their room.

"Good news, Jon," announced Stephen, as Jon crawled onto the sheets without even bothering to kick off his shoes. "I successfully talked my aunt out of taking the kids on an educational trip through the current state of your intestines."

"I...did not realize that was a risk."

"You're welcome," said Stephen pointedly. "So is it getting better? You think you're gonna throw up again?"

"Don't think so," muttered Jon, throwing an arm over his eyes. "Just need to lie down for a while."

"Oh, good! Because they'll charge us extra if any of these rooms incur excessive cleaning costs."

"Gee, thanks for your concern."

Stephen was so uncharacteristically quiet that for a moment Jon thought he had snuck out of the room.

A check-in found him still standing by the bed, though: hands balled into fists, mouth trembling. "Jon," he said at last, "if you are seriously hurt I will make it so that the name of the Olive Garden becomes this continent's vilest curse, and there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth as its founders tear their hair and throw themselves into the sea, lamenting that they were ever allowed to touch the restaurant business."

Jon sighed. "Stephen, babe...I know this doesn't come naturally to you, but do you think you could try to stick to the middle ground for a while? Something that isn't 'pretending you only care about the state of the carpet' _or_ 'threatening to rain down apocalyptic curses on an entire chain restaurant and all its staff because their chicken didn't agree with me one night'?"

Stephen folded his arms. "You're right. It doesn't come naturally. But...I can try it. Just for you."

He fussed over Jon for a bit after that: taking off Jon's shoes for him, getting a glass of water, trying to fluff his pillow (unfortunately, while he was still lying on it). At last Jon convinced Stephen to slow it down, maybe lie quietly in bed if he wanted to stay by Jon's side, but be careful not to bounce around too much.

"I worry about you, you know," said Stephen quietly, curled up next to Jon and holding his hand. "To a moderate degree."

"Yeah?"

"Yes!" exclaimed Stephen. "Because I...somewhat love you. So I need you to be all right. Within reason."

As the words went into Jon's ears, his stomach calmed down. All the way. In an instant.

He rolled over and put an arm around Stephen. "You know I love you too, right? To a reasonable, yet still extremely large, extent."

"Uh-huh."

"And you know that's never gonna change. You can trust me. No matter how many extra eyes...or other appendages...you break out."

"I told you," said Stephen sullenly, tucking his face against Jon's neck. "I don't have tentacles."

"Yeah, okay. But you have something, don't you? Because you're like Cecil. I mean, you're like everyone here, but you're specifically like Cecil. With the capital-V Voice. And I'm guessing it doesn't just work on trees, either — how much power are you sitting on, here?" (When Stephen made his absurd and hyperbolic threats, was it just bluster, or could he do something to back them up?) "And do you also have...is the shifting-appearance thing part of it? When I look at you, am I really seeing you?"

"C'mon, Jon, use your head. Cecil's in _radio_. I'm on _television_."

So everyone was probably seeing him the same way, then. Which did not necessarily mean "how they saw him" was the same as "what he actually looked like."

And Jon didn't miss how Stephen was avoiding denying the rest of it.

"Stephen, please, you've gotta just come clean with me," he pressed. "Don't I have a right to know? And I get why you might be self-conscious, but I was cool with the eye, right? I think I've been pretty calm about everything here, as long as it isn't, like, an imminent threat to my life. Haven't I shown you yet that whatever else is going on with you, no matter how weird it is, I can handle it?"

Stephen squirmed and fidgeted for a bit. Finally he said, "You really want to know everything."

Jon's heart kicked up a notch in anticipation. "Yeah. The whole package."

"Okay." Stephen let out a long breath against his collarbone. "I'll show you. But, again, keeping in mind the financial penalties of damaging the house, we should probably do this outside."

 

\\\\\

 

Everyone had their own little post-coital rituals. Sometimes it was having a cigarette, sometimes it was running to the shower, sometimes it was rolling over and falling asleep. Carlos' just happened to be naked science, okay?

(He did have a sheet thrown over his legs, and the laptop itself was resting on a cooling pad. Just because he wasn't getting dressed didn't mean he didn't respect basic safety procedures.)

Cecil was collapsed in a blissed-out heap next to him, wearing nothing but Carlos' lab coat. Every couple of minutes Carlos would look away from the _Report_ clip he was casually analyzing to enjoy the view.

He hadn't found any conclusive incidents of Stephen using the full power of the Voice yet, so, just for kicks, he had moved on to get some comparative readings on other members of the show's staff. It was tricky; they didn't seem to last long. Intern Meg died from sampling poisoned water. Stage Manager Bobby...the official line was that he resigned, but it looked suspiciously as if Stephen had barbecued and eaten him.

("Bobby _tendered_ his resignation," explained the host in the recording, with an irrepressible grin over his steaming plate of ribs. Carlos groaned under his breath: " _Stephen_.")

Intern Jay, in particular, got into all kinds of hazardous situations in the service of late-night TV. He had apparently survived each one, because there was always a more recent clip that followed, but he was bound to lose his life any episode now...

...and that was the point when Carlos caught himself, because hold the phone, what was he thinking? Sure, you had to get used to intern death at NVCR, but the _Report_ was in New York! Had his sense of normality really been that warped by life in Night Vale, that he couldn't even recognize a near-100% death rate as a horrible, tragic loss?

He'd been staring at the screen too long; he was giving himself a headache. Carlos put the laptop aside again and massaged his brow, trying to bring the pressure down.

_Stephen's studio isn't located in Weird America itself...but that's where he's from, and it shows. Vicious mutant styrofoam cups. Rings that turn you invisible. A visitor straight out of Weird Europe. Dimensional anomalies. High death counts._

"Mmm," sighed Cecil, sitting up on his elbows, the lab coat slipping down to bare his shoulders. "Carlos, are you all right?"

"I...don't know," said Carlos, though the fact that he wasn't being distracted by the delicious sight in front of him probably meant that no, he wasn't all right. "I don't know. Cecil? Where's your nephew with the tentacles? He was one of the kids wrestling with you yesterday morning, and I haven't seen him all day."

"Carlos, I don't know if you've noticed, but people in my family tend to have a fair amount of children," said Cecil gently. "You can't expect me to keep track of them all."

"Right," murmured Carlos. "Lots of children. Except...except for you."

A violet blush rose on Cecil's cheeks. "It isn't that I don't _want_ them — to be perfectly honest, I've always dreamed of having a large family — but of course it would depend on what my partner wanted, too, once I and that person got to a point where we were discussing —"

"Not what I meant!" snapped Carlos. He felt bad the instant Cecil cringed. "Sorry — I'm not mad, it's just the headache, I'm on edge — and I do want to ask you about...things like that, at some point, but not right this second, okay? All I mean is...lots of big families, and this reunion is full of your cousins, but you, you don't have any brothers or sisters here. Or siblings of any other genders."

"This is true," said Cecil carefully.

"Were you an only child? Did you just happen to have parents who bucked the trend?"

"I was the second youngest of five," said Cecil, and, whoa, how did Carlos not know that? He only had a little brother himself, and he'd been talking about Mike just the other day. Cecil had four siblings, and not one of them had ever come up? "There are photo albums back home. I can show you, if you're interested."

Carlos dug his fingers into his temples. "But none of them are here." None of Stephen's siblings were with this group either, but in their case, it didn't feel like they'd dropped off the face of the earth. He'd seen even a couple of them on the show itself: a lawyer brother, a sister who ran for Congress. "So where are they?"

He could almost hear Wanda's voice yelling in the back of his mind. _C'mon, you weaselly wimp, figure it out already!_

But echoing along with it was Arnold's: _You really should've stayed home today. And pretty much every other day. Never should have left home in the first place, frankly._

And right behind that one, Shirley's —

— no, that wasn't right. When had he known a Shirley?

"You should lie down." Cecil was breaking into the dulcet tones of the Voice again: soothing, a wonderful relief to Carlos' pounding head, but not having the full effect he was probably aiming for. "I'll turn off the lights and get you some water. And something for the pain. Aspirin, that's the one you take, isn't it?"

"No. Thank you. But no." Carlos waved a hand for Cecil to lie back down. "Right now, before I do anything else, I have to...."

He stood up. The sheet slipped off of his legs.

"...put some pants on," finished Carlos. "But after that, and before anything _further_ , I have to go do some...scientific inquiry."

Cecil looked like he was struggling not to wrap a surplus of limbs around Carlos and keep him from going anywhere. (Again.) With an effort he held still, saying only, "I will be right here when you get back."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TCR references: [Meg the Intern dies](http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/73587/august-21-2006/the-word---side-effects); [a farewell to Bobby](http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/185581/april-21-2008/farewell-to-bobby); [Jay the Intern](http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/410757/march-19-2012/5-x-five---colbert-report-characters---jay-the-intern); [attack by styrofoam cup](http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/180135/august-29-2008/revenge-of-the-styrofoam-cups); [ring of invisibility](http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/402386/november-15-2011/sign-off---one-ring); [the new Ottoman Empire](http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/419513/september-26-2012/obama-s-ottoman-empire); [lawyer brother](http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/264535/february-22-2010/vancouverage-2010---ed-colbert); [sister who ran for Congress](http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/425045/april-03-2013/morning-joe-vs--the-colbert-report).


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stephen takes Jon for a ride, while Carlos recovers his childhood memories in full.

The sky was alight with clear, cold stars.

It was rare that Jon found himself in a place with this little light pollution. He scanned the night with interest for familiar constellations...and couldn't even find the Big Dipper. By this point he wouldn't have been surprised to learn that they'd switched hemispheres, except that he didn't see the Southern Cross, either.

He turned to ask Stephen where they were, and the question was shocked out of his mind by the fact that Stephen's eyes had started glowing: all three irises, a burnished, molten gold.

"You should probably stand back," said Stephen, waving for Jon to stay by the front door as he hopped down the steps and took a brisk walk along the path. When they were about twenty feet apart, Stephen stopped and turned around; his eyes blazed in the post-twilight darkness, the light flickering out as he closed them, just for a moment.

There was a low _whumph_ as the air around him exploded outward from the manifestation.

Wind rippled the grass in all directions. Jon stumbled back a step from the force of the gust. And when he caught his breath, he found Stephen spreading —

Wings.

Massive bald-eagle wings, deep brown with a subtly paler shade on the undersides of the flight feathers, big enough that Stephen could have cocooned his entire body in just one of them. Even that size wasn't enough to explain the force with which they moved through the air. It kicked up another light breeze when Stephen fluttered his long primaries like worrying fingers.

"Is it safe yet?" called Jon. He wanted to get a closer look at Stephen's new limbs, but he didn't feel like getting blown over in the process.

The edges of a complementary white-feathered tail flared behind Stephen's legs, sticking out from the back of his button-down like an untucked shirt. "For you, yes!"

Jon jogged to his side. With careful slowness, Stephen curved one wing down around them so Jon could get a closer look. They might not be as sexually tantalizing as tentacles, but they were beautiful, and Jon said so as he stroked the silky undersides of a row of feathers as long as his forearm. "These are really something, Stephen."

Stephen's eyes flashed a brighter gold yet, lighting up the blush on his face. "Well, of course they are," he stammered. "I'm the Voice of America — well, _one_ Voice of America, there's also Al Jones in DC, and a couple of others — but even shared, it's a big job. Do you — do you want to see another thing? It may not work out, but I can try to show you. If you're interested."

Yes, Jon was definitely interested. And in this area, he'd never had any problems from trusting Stephen. He squeezed Stephen's shoulder, close to the base of one wing. "I'd love to."

"Great!" said Stephen. "Hold on tight."

"Wait, what —"

Before he could finish the question, Stephen had scooped him into a princess carry, dropped into a crouch, spread his mighty wings, and _flapped_.

They shot away from the ground like a firework into the sky.

 

\\\\\

 

It was chilly outside with the sun down. Carlos was glad he hadn't thrown out all his sweatshirts when he moved to Night Vale, glad he'd been able to toss a few in his suitcase when Cecil said "oh, just pack for everything." He didn't actually remember packing this particular navy-blue hoodie, but it was on the top of the pile, so (after the routine check for scorpions) he pulled it on.

As always, a lab coat went on top of everything else. His little way of saying _no matter how much you scare me, I still believe in Science_ to whatever reality-bending terrors he might run into.

(Like what appeared to be a crop circle in the cabin's front lawn: all the grass flattened outward from a central point, to at least an eight-foot radius. He walked straight across it without letting his confidence flag. If whatever had created it was still watching, it didn't have the nerve to bother him.)

A half moon was rising behind the dark outlines of the mismatched trees. By its light Carlos followed the dirt path from his cabin to the place where the cars were parked. He didn't know which of the cabins Cecil's aunt was sleeping in; instead, he had a vague idea of looking for the bus, and asking it where she was.

No sign of the bus in the lot. But from this angle, the silhouette of the main cabin was different from how it had been in the daytime: there was some kind of viewing platform on the roof. In the moonlight, it gleamed yellow.

Carlos approached.

He was a few paces away from the building when a rope ladder unrolled itself over the edge and bumped invitingly against the faux-rustic wooden walls.

The climb was a piece of cake. It took him two floors off the ground, but he'd been to higher heights. Sometimes at tinier sizes, too, and other times with carnivorous predators snapping at his heels.

The bus/platform had a simple metal railing surrounding most of the edge, and right up against it on one side was a telescope. Not the portable apparatus of an amateur stargazer, but a professional setup taller than Carlos himself. It had a robotic mount, the kind that could be programmed to precisely track a single star across the night (Mikey would have loved that), and its crown jewel was a lens nearly two feet across.

"Ah, Carlos!" said Aunt Valerie, not looking up from the eyepiece. She was wearing a navy-blue polo shirt and a knee-length business skirt, both printed with twinkling star charts, plus earrings in the shape of full moons. "It's a lovely night for stargazing, isn't it? Right now I have my lens trained on Alpha Centauri...which looks like a single star to the unaided human eye, but with even a very small telescope you can see for yourself that it's been a binary star system all along."

"Huh," said Carlos. By way of small talk, he added, "Have you ever been there?"

"Do you know, I never have. Which is such a shame! It's barely over four light years away from our Sun, and it's quite possible there are Earthlike planets orbiting either of those stars. I just haven't made the time."

Exactly how far across the universe could her bus go?

"But I see you haven't come up here to talk about astronomy with me."

"No," said Carlos, and for all the determination that had carried him here, he was relieved she'd given him the opening. He'd had thesis advisers who didn't inspire as much academic deference in him as she did. "I came up here to ask...who was Phil?"

A soft silence, except for the crickets in the trees.

"Who was Shirley?" continued Carlos, warming to his topic. "And how about the blonde girl, not Dorothy Ann, someone else, who was always wearing that green dress with the polka dots? Or the other Latino boy, the one with the curlier hair? Even as I'm saying that, I can't picture him. Why do I know that sounds right when I can't actually remember what he looked like?"

"Ah," sighed Valerie. "Something's put you on to this train of thought, I take it."

"People in Night Vale have big families, but none of the adults in this group are siblings," said Carlos. "They take it in stride. They're _used_ to losing people. The kids you teach, we get our memories of the weird stuff blocked afterward, but with finesse — we don't lose the whole year, we don't even feel that there are logical gaps, the incidents we can't handle are just smoothed right over. Cecil — Cecil didn't _let_ me go on your field trip the other day. How...why...?"

Aunt Valerie turned to face him. Printed across the front of her skirt was a black hole, its event horizon glowing softly, the star charts around it warping on their way to someday being drawn in.

Carlos caught his breath.

"Do you remember what I always used to say, Carlos?" she said — and it was gentle, as open and approachable as she'd always been. "If you keep asking questions...you'll keep getting answers."

It wasn't a threat. A warning, yes. But also an offer.

Voice cracking like he was a kid again, Carlos said, " _How many of us died?_ "

His teacher's eyes fluttered closed for a second as she thought back. "There would have been eight left at the end of your year, am I right?"

Carlos counted off the ones he remembered clearly on his fingers. Dorothy Ann, Arnold, Wanda, Tim, Phoebe, Ralphie, Keesha, and himself. And why hadn't that ever stood out to him as strange? He'd grown up in a nice middle-class school district, sure, but not one where the student:teacher ratios were _that_ low.

"Yes, of course. You were one of my stronger classes. There were twenty-one to begin with — twenty-two, after Phoebe transferred in. More than a third of you made it through."

A wave of fight-or-flight adrenaline swept through Carlos' system as a whole new set of memories started clicking into place.

_Gregory's protective suit failing on their miniature trek through the bus's engines. A bat-eared Molly screaming as her bones snapped in an owl's beak. Amanda-Jane's body lying dead in a green spacesuit on the surface of Pluto._

Near-death experiences rushed back along with the deadly ones. _Phoebe, pale and twitching in the bus's spontaneously-generated medical bay, while her teacher expertly treated a venomous snake bite. The Friz with a bright yellow rocket launcher, taking out a T-rex moments before its jaws closed on Arnold._

(Maybe the memory blocks had never worked as well on Arnold as the rest of them. Maybe that was why he'd spent the year expecting the worst, while the rest of them were always delighted when the next field trip came around....)

Oh, God, Carlos had let _Mike_ go on trips sometimes. He'd let six-year-old Mikey go once when he _hadn't_. And that was the trip Phil didn't come back from. If whatever went wrong had played out just a little differently, would he have forgotten even his own baby brother?

"How could you let that happen?" he yelled, shaking with emotion. "How could you keep putting us in that kind of danger when you knew, you _knew_ you wouldn't always bring us all back?"

"Think back over all the time you've lived in Cecil's home town," prompted the Friz. "How many interns have you heard him send off into situations they didn't survive?"

A lot. Too many to count on his fingers. And Carlos didn't hold it against Cecil, but, but — "They volunteer. They're adults — or at least older teenagers. They know what they're getting into! We were children!"

"Based on your observations, were you ever in more danger than an average child in Night Vale?"

"Based on my observations, we weren't _in_ Night Vale! Just because some kids have the bad luck to grow up in Weird America — with all the possibly-fatal hazards that implies — that doesn't make it okay to find a group of kids who otherwise would have been _fine_ , and bring your own little piece of Weird America to us!"

"Why, Carlos. You of all people should know that there's no impermeable border between Weird America and everywhere else. It didn't take you any magic to get there, did it?"

He shook his head. No, it hadn't. Just a map with the hidden roads scribbled in, and a list of directions explaining which unmarked exits to keep an eye out for.

"There was nothing to stop you from driving right in. Without any kind of protection, or even the faintest conscious idea what you were getting into."

She used one foot to pop open a panel in the surface of the bus/platform, and retrieved a bundle of cloth which she tossed in his direction. Carlos reflexively grabbed it out of the air: a wool hat and scarf, dark blue, just his size.

"When I first started reading my dear nephew's Facebook posts about the perfect scientist who had come to town, I was certain the poor boy was going to get his heart broken. Outsiders come into places like that all the time, you know. And if you haven't grown up learning how to survive it, the odds are so terribly low that you'll figure it out as adults before it's too late."

"I managed," said Carlos, knowing how weak it sounded. Even if he kept it up, his team's overall death-or-abandonment rate would stay at 91% — somewhere between the death rate of Cecil's interns, and the death rate of Cecil's parents' children.

"Well, of course you did!" said Valerie. "Oh, I should have figured it out as soon as I read that you'd earned your first-year trophy! You might not have the conscious memories, but you did have that childhood training after all. And from one of the best, if I do say so myself."

"Fourteen kids had to die for me to get that _training!_ " cried Carlos. "Are you trying to say it was worth it? Just because it might be the only reason I lived long enough to hook up with Cecil?"

"This modesty isn't like you, Carlos," chided Valerie. "I'm sure that isn't the only thing you've done in Night Vale."

The field of mostly-void behind her was starting to shimmer with light. Not the darting whitish spheres above the Night Vale Arby's, but ribbons of green, blue, purple. Auroras.

"I know Cecil has a tendency to exaggerate, so I've been taking his descriptions of your adventures with a grain of salt...but you _have_ been instrumental in averting an apocalypse or two, am I right?"

 

///

 

The resort, the forest, and the suburbs of the nearby town spread out below like a miniature train set. Windows and streetlights made tiny points of light, an earthbound starfield.

Jon was panting for air and clinging to Stephen like a vise, but he wasn't actively yelling at Stephen to take him back down, which seemed like a good sign. He was scared in a normal way, not in existential terror for his life. He should be able to handle this.

Which just showed that Aunt Valerie had been right: he'd completely forgotten the part of the field trip where Stephen's nephew got eaten by a shark.

"I'm trying to find the right angle for something," said Stephen into Jon's ear. "On a night like this you can get an effect where the things I see are visible to standard human eyes. It's like with rainbows — the light gets scattered into the visible spectrum — as long as you're in the right place to see."

"Neat!" said Jon weakly.

Jon would hate it if he knew part of his memory was being blocked. He would be so mad at Stephen if he realized Stephen was helping to keep him in the dark. But sometimes a little healthy repression was what normal people needed to avoid becoming the next Alfred Clarendon or Richard Pickman. And when it came to making judgment calls on that issue, there was no one Stephen trusted more than Aunt Valerie and her bus.

(Stephen himself was taking the death in stride. He never got close enough to the kids for these things to hit too hard. He made a point of not even learning their names until they were at least twelve.)

He kept closing his third eye, trying to see if the extra layer of glow it took in was visible to the other two yet, as they soared in a wide arc below the clouds. When the auroras started spreading out around them, he knew they were getting warm.

And he knew before closing the eye again that they'd hit the spot, just by the way Jon gasped.

Auras shone across the earth from here to the horizon. Most of them were a pure, balanced white, haloing the apartments and the houses, sometimes with tints of red or blue. Almost directly below him and Jon, the cabins glittered with a veritable rainbow. Even the ethereal ribbons of the Eastern Lights that had started to dance in the sky around them paled in comparison.

"Oh my god," breathed Jon. At this altitude, his words came out in puffs of frost. "Are those — are those people?"

"Mostly," said Stephen. "In the broad sense of the word _people._ " The optical effect revealing the lights to Jon was also making it more brilliant for Stephen. If he focused, he could even pick out a few particularly radiant individuals: Aunt Valerie's bright yellow, Cecil's stunning violet (with its tendrils that spiraled outward, linking him indelibly back to Night Vale).

Jon clung more tightly to his neck. "I...listen, this is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen in my life. And I better not have set myself up for an ironic death by saying that."

(Maybe one day Jon would remember everything. Maybe, after it happened, he would appreciate why Stephen had kept him in the dark. Either way, in the meantime, giving Jon this view was Stephen's way of trying to make it up to him.)

"Guess we're not at the right angle for me to see ours," continued Jon, turning from the glowing panorama to study the two of them. "Can I ask what they look like?"

"Well, obviously mine is red, white, and blue," said Stephen solemnly. (He couldn't understand why Jon giggled. It was a perfectly dignified color set.) "And yours...."

_Yours is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. Sometimes when you're getting all righteously angry about truth and justice it makes you look like an angel, at least as far as wattage is concerned. I'll never tell you any of this, because it would give you a horribly unfair advantage if you knew, but the upshot is that I would never seriously be tempted away from you, even by the most gorgeous, chiseled, perfect-haired man in the world._

_Well, not tempted into anything long-term. I could probably be lured away for a night. A week, tops._

"Yours is...blue-ish."

Jon grimaced. "Is it at least a nice shade of blue-ish?"

For just a moment, Stephen gave in to his tenderer, less-manly emotions. He nuzzled his face against Jon's not-perfect, but plenty-distinguished-thank-you-very-much, hair, and whispered. "The nicest."

 

\\\\\

 

He had promised to be waiting when Carlos got back, and so Cecil was, dressed and with his hair combed but otherwise unchanged. His boyfriend was wearing a hat and scarf that matched the hoodie, and a vacant look that frankly didn't go well with anything, even in such perfect eyes.

Cecil stood, hands folded, waiting uncertainly for a hint about how to proceed. So much depended on how deeply Carlos had remembered — and whether he'd re-repressed some or all of it shortly afterward.

Carlos closed the door behind him, leaning back against it with a heavy sigh.

Eyes shut, he said, "Did you know, about a decade ago, one of your aunt's other former students helped stop some kind of hell-god from merging a demonic alternate dimension with ours?"

"I had not heard that," said Cecil carefully. "But I certainly believe it."

"How about the one who stopped an alien invasion from destroying the planet's biosphere? That was just a few years back. Did you catch that story?"

"Ah! Yes, I remember her. The talk show host."

Carlos opened his eyes to peer at Cecil in confusion. "I meant the one who worked for NASA. There was a talk show host too?"

"Oh, yes. Doctor something, from _The Queen of Worries_."

"What? That can't be right. That trashy Springer clone?"

"Don't say that around Old Woman Josie," Cecil warned him. "She still tapes the reruns every morning."

"I'll keep it in mind." Carlos massaged his temples. "How about the one who...there was a sunken city, I can't remember the name, but it was preparing to rise out of the ocean, and that would have been bad...."

"Standard part of the eighth grade history curriculum," said Cecil. Didn't need to confirm the name to recognize that story. Which was good, since he wasn't about to say _R'lyeh_ out loud, though he wouldn't put it past Aunt Valerie to throw it around like it was nothing. "Carlos...speaking of things you remember...."

"Everything," said Carlos shortly. "Every _one_. The details aren't all clear, but I have their names back. Their faces. What happened to them."

Cecil tried his hardest to put himself in his boyfriend's stylish yet practical shoes. It wasn't easy. What was a revelation for Carlos was routine for him; about a quarter of his own third-grade class hadn't made it through the year, on top of the former classmates that had already been weeded out in second, first, and kindergarten. "And how are you feeling?"

"I...." The hollow look was back. "I don't know. The world's still here. That's a good thing, right? Would it be okay if I felt happy about that?"

"Sweet Carlos." Cecil went to him, traced the lines of his cheeks, started to unwind the scarf from his neck. "Come and lie down."

Carlos allowed Cecil to take and fold up his new cold-weather things, slide the lab coat off of his shoulders, and guide him over to the bed. He lay with his head in Cecil's lap, where Cecil could tousle away some of the flatness the hat had imposed on his perfect hair.

"I am happy that the world is still here," said Cecil solemnly. "That I am alive, to be in it. That you are alive, to be here with me."

"You're soliloquizing."

Well, yes. It _was_ one of the things he did best. "Should I not? Is there something else I can do?"

Carlos took a slow breath. "Do you feel up to talking about...what happened to your siblings?"

 

///

 

Some of the families with longer commutes to get home had already left by the time Jon woke up. The adults who remained kept trying to foist leftovers on him and Stephen, "for the road," forcing Jon to explain several times that the normal American TSA had regulations about carrying liquids in general, and kerosene in particular.

By the time they were pretty much packed, Jon still hadn't seen Carlos. He left Stephen and Cecil by the cars, where they were happily arguing about whether government had a role in ensuring its citizens had health care or was only good for spying on them, and went to check their cabin.

Carlos was a desk in his and Cecil's room, wearing a lab coat over flannel pajamas, engrossed in something that seemed to involve three different electronic devices, a small stack of notebooks, and at least four pens. Jon knocked tentatively on the doorjamb. "Hey, uh, I don't want to interrupt anything, but we're about to head out...."

"Oh! I'll come see you off," said Carlos. "Just give me a second to save everything."

It was actually half a minute before he was organized enough to accompany Jon down the hall. "Big science project?" said Jon lightly.

Carlos looked sheepish. "Sort of. I guess you could say it's anthropology, which isn't usually my field, but...It's about local child safety, actually. And, um. Constructing an empirically-supported framework of parental best practices in my home region."

Jon took a moment to pull that apart, then grinned. "You and Cecil are thinking about kids?"

"I want to stress that we're in the earliest possible stages!" said Carlos. Jon was pretty sure he was blushing. "There's a lot to be aware of first — you really have no idea — and some of it is pretty daunting, but I don't want that to turn me away. I want to know all of it. A scientist is always thoroughly prepared."

"I think that's the Boy Scouts."

Carlos started, then pulled a pen out of his pocket. "Can't believe I left that off the list," he muttered, scribbling on the back of his hand as they emerged into the yard. "Have to figure out if there's a way to avoid the Boy Scouts."

It sounded like there was a story there, but Jon had a plane to catch, so he didn't press it. "Listen, it's a tremendous experience, risks and all, and I wish you all the luck in the world with it," he said. "And if you and Cecil, and possibly someone else, ever want to come to New York...see the sights, maybe take in some theater...call us up, all right?"

The scientist smiled. "I'll keep it in mind."

They were approaching the cars now, and the sound of raised voices. "Jon!" yelled Stephen as they got closer. "Tell Cecil that government-created pandemics are inefficient and a waste of taxpayer money!"

"I'm going to tell Cecil goodbye, and that it was lovely to meet him," said Jon firmly. "You should probably do something similar, because we're about to go."

Stephen let out a heavy, theatrical sigh, but pulled his cousin into a hug. "It was nice seeing you again, you jerk."

"It was so good to catch up!" agreed Cecil, slapping him on the back a little too hard. "Good luck on not losing that trophy your show always loses this year."

"Hey, at least in my town a trophy _means_ something!"

"Lasting a year without dying is very meaningful!"

Jon and Carlos shared a knowing, exasperated look before stepping in to gently but firmly pull their boyfriends apart.

This was the point when a small yellow bird — it looked like the world's bravest goldfinch — flew into the middle of the group. Stephen held out a hand, and the finch perched right on it. "Aunt Valerie! Are you taking off now too?"

The bird, which on closer inspection looked suspiciously mechanical and appeared to have a windshield for a face, opened its beak. "Sadly, yes," said Aunt Valerie, her currently-tiny voice blasted over a megaphone to nearly-normal levels. "Time waits for no woman, unless you have a time machine, and I try to use that sparingly."

She exchanged goodbyes with her nephews. Stephen urged Jon to pat the bus/bird's head, and it let out a chirpy _beep-beep!_ of appreciation.

"Oh, and — Carlos?" added Aunt Valerie, the bus doing a little hopping turn on Stephen's finger so it was facing the other two men.

Carlos, who was still hanging on to his boyfriend from behind, stammered, "Yes?"

"I know you two already have travel arranged, so I won't offer you a ride," said his former teacher warmly, almost gently. "But if ever you come across a scientific problem where you could use the help of a shape-changing bus...or a certified field surgeon, or a Level 3 exorcist, or if you just want to borrow a shrinkerscope, or anything at all...Cecil knows how to get in touch."

A confusing mix of emotions passed across Carlos' face. Either Jon was imagining things, or his grip on Cecil's arm got just a fraction tighter. Cecil was definitely keeping quiet on purpose, ready to defer to Carlos' reaction.

But the response Carlos settled on was a cautious smile. "We just might."

"Now that's what I like to hear!" exclaimed Aunt Valerie. "And on that note...Bus, do your stuff!"

In about twenty minutes Jon would be safely past the borders of Weird America. The air pressure would change back, Stephen would close his extra eye, the stars would arrange themselves in familiar patterns, and the laws of physics would start applying on a regular basis again.

But for now, he got to watch as a miniature magic bus spread its wings and soared off into the blue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While it isn't supposed to be a sequel or anything, this story does owe a certain debt of inspiration to the unqualified-creepy [On The Ice](http://elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com/132144.html).
> 
> If you want something unqualified-fluffy, have [a Cecil & Carlos Ramon third-grade AU](http://sailorptah.deviantart.com/art/Third-Grade-Science-406246070).
> 
> I post all my [fanart on Deviantart](http://sailorptah.deviantart.com/), some of which [gets crossposted to Tumblr](http://bicatperson.tumblr.com/), and all my [fic and mixes on Dreamwidth](http://ptahrrific.dreamwidth.org/), some of which get crossposted here on the AO3. Come and talk to me about fandom or my WIPs at any of these places; it would be a delight.


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